Currently, it is expensive, inconvenient, and time-consuming for shops and department stores to gift wrap items purchased by customers. Conventional gift wrapping requires store personnel to measure and cut gift wrapping paper from a roll, wrap the gift article in the gift wrapping paper, and seal the package with clear adhesive tape. This operation takes a substantial amount of employee time, thereby creating a significant labor expense. Furthermore, additional expense is incurred due to the inevitable waste of gift wrapping material resulting from inadvertent mismeasurement of the paper, accidental tearing of the gift wrapping material and the generation of unusable pieces of gift wrapping material.
Many attempts have been made in the past to create an expensive, preformed gift box that could be rapidly assembled and would present the appearance of a gift-wrapped package. Such attempts to create preformed gift boxes have been largely unsuccessful because these preformed gift boxes were either too complicated, involving a multitude of flaps, tabs, and slits, therefore being difficult to assemble, or they were aesthetically unpleasing in that they did not present the appearance of a gift-wrapped package. Furthermore, many of the prior attempts to create a preformed gift box required almost as much time to assemble the preformed box as was required to conventionally gift wrap an article.